Holtz Communications + Technology

Warning: Lost post follows

Back in 1995, “Snow Crash” author Neal Stephenson teamed up with his uncle George Jewsbury under the pseudonym Stephen Bury to produce a potboiler titled “Interface.” The premise: A presidential candidate suffers a stroke and has a chip implanted in his brain. The chip features a wireless connection to feedback from thousands of watch-like devices distributed to a representative sample…

Content Summary:A panel of veteran PR and marketing practitioners and academics discuss the relationship between marketing and PR and how it impacts the structure of a communications function within an organization.

Discussion participants were FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz, and our panelists:

• Deirdre Breakenridge
• Beth Harte
• Mitch Joel
• Valeria Maltoni
• Bill Sledzik

Plus, our listeners who called in to the live show with commentary as…

Google Wave, wikis, Basecamp, Ning, Zoho…

With all the collaboration tools the whole social media phenomonen has ushered in, you’d think the people who tout them would make better use of them. But one of the consequences of the fragmentation of communication activities is that the various departments, agencies and boutiques assigned to segments of communication operate in a near vacuum. The resulting…

One of the most interesting observations I gleaned from Forrester’s recent projections is that some of the greatest growth in interactive marketing is likely to come from industries that have been slow to adopt it so far.

I would classify this under “blinding flashes of the obvious,” but it still jumped out at me because Forrester is suggesting that these industries—which include heavily regulated…

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:

• eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009.…

The FTC’s freshly-minuted disclosure rules for bloggers and the companies that reach out to them may be sounding alarms among those who aren’t already disclosure-minded, but a lot of bloggers and companies have always been mindful of candor and honesty. Long before the FTC even began looking at governing a practice that PR people, marketers, advertisers and bloggers weren’t policing for themselves, some…